


Persevere and Thrive

by tuntekorpp, Zippit



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Injury Recovery, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-04
Updated: 2017-07-04
Packaged: 2018-11-23 11:13:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11401356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tuntekorpp/pseuds/tuntekorpp, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zippit/pseuds/Zippit
Summary: James "Bucky" Barnes is recovering in Wakanda after the aftermath of Captain America: Civil War in more ways than one. Their advanced medicine and technology have restored his mind and body, but that's simply the beginning. Who is James "Bucky" Barnes now that he's his own man again? And who is Natasha Romanoff to him? Aside from a slightly demented cat in human form with links to his past.





	Persevere and Thrive

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2017 round of Captain America Reverse Big Bang
> 
> I got to write a fic based on the wonderful art of tuntekorpp. Their wonderful art is linked [here](http://tuntematonkorppi.tumblr.com/post/162487021357/my-second-artwork-for-the-capreversebb-with-a).
> 
> I hope you enjoy the story as much as I did writing it based off your art. :)

Wakanda has been kind to him. A new arm, a new mind, a place to rest and recover.

The lush greenery he sees out the windows every morning is a welcome contrast to the cities and fragmented memories of his time as the Winter Soldier. He’s grateful for this chance to figure out who he is under the mythos and the people he used to be. Bucky sighs as he automatically sweeps his gaze from one end of his spacious room to the other, clocking the various exit routes and objects that he can use as weapons if necessary. He’s still uncomfortable with being utterly unarmed in the Wakandan palace but he’s a guest here. His mother raised him better than to be a common heathen.

Thoughts like that still make him pause in disbelief that his mind’s been healed to such an extent. It hardly seems real. He doesn’t trust it to not slip through his fingers like the mist of everything else. Those memories are the clearest. The ones from before and leading up through the war. It’s the stuff that comes after that’s less distinct even with all of Wakanda’s advanced medicine and technology.

Bucky curls his toes into the plush carpet, sinking into the fibers and gripping. Every simple pleasure is magnified here with the sheer opulence. It’s nothing like his old New York or his existence after he’d fished Steve out of the Potomac after the fall of SHIELD. Steve. Goddamn Steve.

He’s here with him in this place, hovering nearby in a weird role reversal of the majority of their childhood. Steve’s trying not to be overbearing but it’s _Steve_. The fact of Steve trying not to be overbearing in his concern leads to it filling a whole room with its presence. Bucky shakes his head and pads over to the small kitchenette in his room to grab himself a water bottle from the fridge. He gulps it down and wipes the back of his hand across his mouth. His gaze flicks to his new arm.

The one he’d had before Stark incinerated it had been heavy. An albatross on his body as much as his shadowy past was now an equal weight on his soul. It’d torqued his body in ways it wasn’t meant to be stressed. His training and his own physique had adjusted to it. He’s had to relearn his own body yet again and resents how long it’s taken. Off kilter in his own skin even though his mind’s in the best shape it’s been in in years.

He crushes the bottle in his hand. The too loud crinkling crash of it crunching in on itself is satisfying in a way he can’t place. It satisfies that dark pit in his stomach that he doesn’t know how to fill. He has an idea of what else might fill it. No, he knows exactly what will fill it. He won’t lie to himself. There’s been enough lies in his life as it is.

He throws the bottle into the trash can and scowls into the empty room. The longer he stays here “recuperating” the more the urge to get out and do something grows under his skin. Steve keeps asking him what he’d like to do and Bucky has no answer for him.

Because the big question? The question everyone in the world wants an answer to and the one answer Bucky himself wants to know is who is he?

Is he the Winter Soldier, a ghost of a ghost, or is he James Buchanan Barnes, Captain America’s long lost buddy from WWII?

He doesn’t know the answer to that question any more than the world does. If he asked Steve, and Steve’s told him many times already, that he’s Bucky Barnes, his buddy, his pal. Bucky thinks _Steve_ believes that. He wants so hard to believe it that he won’t accept anything less. It’s the name that rolls off Steve’s tongue the easiest. It’s the one that’s the first thing to come to mind when Bucky thinks about himself. But is that who he really is?

The others trapped here in this exile of exiles call him Barnes. He’ll take that. It’s better than Soldier, which evokes entirely too many memories of his time as a puppet within his own body. Bucky’s pretty certain that Wilson will never not look at him without suspicion in his eyes. Trust isn’t easily earned. And there’s always the possibility he’ll have some hidden trigger the Wakanda doctors hadn’t managed to erase from his mind.

But her.

The first time she’d walked through the door she’d called him “James.” He couldn’t help the flinch. He couldn’t help staring at her in confusion. Bucky, Barnes, and Soldier he could understand, but James? The only time he’d ever been called that was when he was in trouble either from his Ma or from his CO. There was nothing in between.

Who was he? Who was he to her?

* * *

After her first visit, Bucky had read everything he could get his hands on about Natasha Romanoff, the Black Widow that’d defected from Russia and been SHIELD’s greatest asset on record. He’d shifted through the info dump that had come about by her own hands at SHIELD’s fall. He’d dug through the tabloids and gossip rags. It was overwhelming the sheer amount of speculation and information about the infamous Black Widow. Almost as much of a ghost of a ghost as the Winter Soldier. Steve had told him how the Winter Soldier had been even a myth to her and Bucky hadn’t believed him fully.

Steve was a lot of things but sometimes he missed the obvious when it was right in front of his face. He was too stubborn for his own good. Bucky also remembers the words she said to him while he was breaking out from that facility after his initial capture. There’s more to her story, to _their_ story, than she let on. Sitting there reading article after article, he doesn’t know what it is. There’s too many possibilities and not enough hard facts.

Natasha flits in and out at her prerogative. No warning, no notice, though Barton seems to have some kind of heads up. He gets cagier and harder to pin down when she’s incoming. Bucky tried calling her Romanoff and it hadn’t felt right. Something about her required he call her by her name. It frustrates him he doesn’t know what that is. His memories won’t tell him anything. His brain’s fully healed and restored as per the Wakandan doctors but that doesn’t explain why he still can’t remember her. The red head with the piercing green eyes and a smirk.

He remembers her on the bridge countering his moves, saving Steve and Wilson from his deadly precision. They’d fought before he was certain of that. There was no other way she should’ve been able to escape him otherwise. And when it came down to it, he’d gone after her on an equal level to Steve. Her threat had been that high. Unusual to say the least.

There are two things that are predictable about her visits. The length of time is never guaranteed and the amount of time she spends with him is limited. She and Barton are usually holed up together for hours on end. If he really wanted he could find a way to figure out what all those closed door sessions were about. T’Challa might not end up too mad at him but Steve’s disappointment would follow him around for weeks. Bucky’s already rolling his eyes at the mental image.

This time she’s been in the compound for two days and the only reason he even knows she’s here is Barton’s behavior and Steve telling him. He’s still relearning the use of his new arm and catching up on the rest of the world history he was gleaning in bits and pieces in Romania. It’s been enough of a distraction that tugging on the thread that leads to the Black Widow hasn’t been at the top of his list of things to do. It’s a close third and he’s too exhausted mentally and physically for it to matter at the end of the day.

So when he stumbles across her training in the gym area of their massive guest floor lodgings he stops and nearly turns back around. This detente of avoiding each other had a surety to it that nothing else in his life did. He wasn’t sure he was ready to break it unintentionally. He was waiting for the next move to be made. He had no moves of his own.

Bucky moves to the perimeter of the simulation area to lean against the wall as he watches her. Her movements carry a lean, lethal grace that’s beauty in motion. He’s watched enough footage of them both to know his movements are more brute strength and overt threat than hers. Neither is lacking in effectiveness. He’s also seen enough to acknowledge the same base skill set. The same transitions from one movement to the next. If they weren’t trained by the same person, then they were trained in the same facility. That much is clear.

He watches her duck and weave her way past the holograms, hair tugged back into a rare ponytail, focused look on her face. She makes quick work of every obstacle that comes her way. It reminds him of the relentless efficiency as she’d cleared out the thugs in Stark’s facility. No movement wasted. He could study her all day. She reaches the end of the simulation with not a scratch on her. Her breathing’s elevated slightly and there’s a light sheen of moisture on her skin. He wouldn’t call it sweat. She turns to walk back to where she’s left herself water and a snack then pauses when she sees him.

“Barnes.”

“Romanoff.”

“I didn’t intrude on your time?”

“Not at all. You run that one before?”

She shakes her head no and sips from her water. There’s a few strands of hair clinging to her forehead and cheeks. She brushes them back absently while her eyes never leave him. It’s the same kind of caution he has around people he doesn’t quite trust, which is everyone but Steve in this case. It’s easier to disguise when there’s more than on person in the room. Mentally tracking everyone and their position relative to him would get old if it wasn’t a subconscious routine. He knows Steve wouldn’t understand even though they did it all throughout the war.

“Seems like you could do with a real challenge.”

“I don’t come here to improve my skills.”

She comes here to make sure they’re all still alive and he’s still himself. He feels his metal hand curl tighter into a fist.

Natasha arches an eyebrow at him and there’s a hint of a smirk at the corner of her mouth. Why’s it so familiar? Why is she so familiar? Why is this verbal sparring like an old threadbare blanket, worn from overuse, against his shoulders?

She pats her face with the towel she’d brought with her before slinging it over her shoulders. She takes another sip from her water and saunters toward the door. She pauses there and throws back over her shoulder, “You look well, Barnes. I’m glad.”

With that she walks out and leaves him to stew in his own thoughts again. Like normal. She’s a puzzle he has no idea how to figure out. Asking Steve about her gets him a puzzled puppy dog look and lines about how that’s just Natasha. She does things her own way and she’ll let you know what it’s all about in time. Usually.

Bucky ends up punching his way through that same simulation multiple times to work out his frustration. When Steve finds him there later, he doesn’t tell him what has him so irritated.

* * *

Her next visit Bucky doesn’t see her at all. He also doesn’t see Barton that whole time either. When he asks Steve about it he gets a shrug. “Steve, you’re telling me you don’t know those two are a thing?”

“They’re private people, Buck. I don’t like prying.” He then gets a stern glance from Steve. “If you’re asking me if I’ve seen them together like a couple, no I haven’t. I don’t know what they are to each other any more than you do. If you want to know, you’re going to have to ask them yourselves.”

Bucky can’t tell if he’s miffed that he later finds out Barton and Natasha had snuck out into the wilds of Wakanda for a week’s respite. At least the next time he saw Barton he was a whole lot tanner than he had been and there was only one explanation for that.

It was the same day he had his scheduled monthly mental eval with the doctors. The last several months they hadn’t been able to tell him anything new. Things were how they should be looking. They were a little concerned that his memories from after they’d subjected him to the Winter Soldier process hadn’t started returning in full. There was nothing structurally wrong with his brain. Maybe the neurons that’d stored those memories were fried beyond saving. He didn’t know. They didn’t know. It’s not like he didn’t understand the majority of the science that went into it all. People tended to forget how smart he was and how he’d had plans for college, on a full scholarship even, before the war had come. It got lost in the reflected shine of being Steve Rogers’ childhood best friend. It was just another blow on being in control of his own body.

Even after all this time, there were still parts of him that weren’t left untouched by Zola and HYDRA.

So walking into his room after that meeting, the air had immediately seemed off. He scans the room and nothing’s been disturbed. The windows are still shut. The curtains pulled and the bed immaculately made. The house staff that wander in and out of his rooms had taken some getting used to. But this wasn’t that. This presence that lingered in the air didn’t smell like the many staff he’d grown accustomed to. It felt foreign even if benign.

He pulls the knife tucked into his spare boots by the door and holds it out as he clears his suite of rooms. Every potential hiding spot is devoid of any signs of life. His bedroom and the other more interior rooms are completely untouched by the feel of that presence. It’s when he gets back to the kitchen, laying his hand on the table, the knife trapped underneath, when he spots the discreet white box. There’s a card under the matching white ribbon with his name scrawled on it in handwriting that’s familiar though he can’t place it.

> I know how they are about weapons in this place. But don’t think I don’t know about the variety of knives you’ve stowed around your room and on your person when you walk around this place. Don’t forget they know it too. It’s simply through T’Challa’s grace and respect for Steve, and possibly even you, that allows us the privilege of them looking the other way.
> 
> Please don’t ruin it for us all.
> 
> But that’s beside the point. You’ve probably surmised by now that I haven’t told Steve everything. The stories and the histories never did get the full truth of you. 
> 
> I figured you might appreciate this. It’s the style of knife you favored when I knew you. I don’t think it’s your actual one but I sourced a fairly accurate reproduction.
> 
> The past isn’t pretty but it’s what made us who we are today. We each come to terms with that in our own way.
> 
> NR

He lifts the top off the box and nestled within the folds of tissue paper are a set of two knives. The Gerber Mark I and Mark II. He remembers the Mark II in the fight with Steve on the overpass. The black anodized blades on both feel comfortable and familiar. He lifts the Mark II and twirls it in his hand. The heft and weight of it are perfect. Balanced and honed just the way he’d prefer it. He has a feeling she would know where his actual one from back then would actually be. Not the one from that overpass fight, but then one from when they knew each other.

Bucky traces his flesh finger lightly along the blade. Any more pressure and he’d slice his finger off. These would have definitely appealed to him if he’d had a choice in picking them. They appeal to him now and he’s not the man who picked these out at all. Or maybe he had been. Had there been enough of him fighting its way to the surface of whatever state he was in to make these choices if he would still make the same choices today? What does that say about him? What does that say about the man he was and is?

He takes to carrying both knives with him. The Mark I tucked in his boot and the Mark II tucked in his pocket because of course Natasha had also provided him with the sheaths that allowed him to wear them concealed on his person. She thought of everything, but her head was clearer than his by a long shot. Bucky still didn’t know what kind of game she was playing with him. If it even was a game she was playing. He sensed no ill intent behind it. That didn’t mean not knowing what she was doing any easier.

Because the truth of the matter is they were all wanted fugitives. Sticking their heads outside the palace walls likely meant death. Natasha had the illusion of being able to freely come and go simply because she was able to keep herself undetected. Steve and the rest of Bucky’s fellow exiles were beginning to get frustrated with being trapped in their gilded cage. Their loyalty to Steve had gotten them in this mess and his loyalty to Bucky had landed them all here.

Bucky was damn tired of having all the world’s problems being laid at his feet. Didn’t he already have enough to deal with?

* * *

Maybe Natasha had hoped the knives would unlock some part of his mind. Hell, he’d hoped for the same thing in the weeks after they’d been gifted to him. But nothing. No dreams, no flashes, nothing but a sense of comfort when he handled the knives or practiced with them in the training area. Just a fancy object that felt at home in his hands. Most weapons felt familiar in his hands at that.

One day he’d spent cleaning his knives, polishing them to their fullest dull black sheen, and noticed there was the faintest impression of lettering at the hilt bottom. Too fine and faded for him to make out but a brief request carried to T’Challa had provided him with the means to figure out what they were. The letters turned out to be Cyrillic.

> _The Spider welcomes you to her lair. I hope these serve you well._

Bucky knew she’d been lying about not being able to locate the originals. Were these the originals in truth? Or were they simply a gift she’d never been able to give him?

This only further confirmed his suspicions they came from the same place. The names and people may be different but the methods, the fallout, had been the same. They’re much alike. If only he could get her to talk to him in straight lines instead of convoluted webs and puzzles then maybe he could begin to make sense of his own place in the world now.

The knives spin themselves in his mind and in his dreams in the subsequent days. What do they say about him? What do they say about his relationship with Natasha Romanoff? Why won’t she give him a straight answer? 

The atmosphere’s only getting tenser with their months long incarceration. It’s a prettier prison than the one they were on in the Raft Steve’s assured him but it’s still a prison by another name. Bucky’s lack of sleep, his lack of answers, makes him snap at everyone from Steve down to himself. He starts to outright avoid people. He doesn’t want them eying him with suspicion in everyone’s case but Steve’s or have Steve asking him to talk to him so they can figure it out.

There’s nothing to figure out, Steve! He wants to scream at him. His brain’s still a fucking deadened and nothing was happening. He can’t do anything. He wants to leave this place. He wants to hunt down the monsters that broke his body and his brain into a million pieces and put it back together like Frankenstein’s monster again and again. He doesn’t want to live up to Steve’s ideal of Bucky Barnes from before the war. His best buddy and friend and stalwart companion on the war campaign. Steve didn’t see it then and he certainly doesn’t see it now but putting on a brave face was all the war was. He may’ve been as good at it as Steve but that didn’t mean he carried it the same. Some days he wonders if Steve saw any of the horrors that Bucky and his men had endured in those battles, in those nameless towns, where all you could trust was the gun in your hands and maybe the guy next to you.

It drives him to endless hours against the punching bag, in the training simulator, in the physical focus on movement and counter movement. Anything to get him outside of his head. He’s not Bucky Barnes and he’s not the Winter Soldier. He’s something in between and that’s not enough.

It’s not what this world wants of him and he doesn’t know how get that through to Steve. He doesn’t know how to make people other than Steve understand that while he isn’t Bucky Barnes he also isn’t the Winter Soldier either.

He’s panting hard as he just drops to the ground after the end of the latest simulation. Legs half drawn up, hands clutching his thighs, because all he wants is someone that sees him for who he is, not who he was. He closes his eyes and focuses on the physical exhaustion dragging at his body. He’s banned Steve from following him around for the last couple days. He’s told them all in no uncertain terms to stay away from him. It’s not like they used the training area with any regularity. It was usually Steve or Barton he’d encounter.

The footsteps jolt him from mild meditative state he’d been in. He peers up through his curtain of dark hair. He hadn’t ever cut it, STOL undecided who he wanted to look like. He blinks at the green eyes that pierce him in place. She’s not dressed for a workout. A loose green tank and jeans. She wouldn’t look out of place on the streets of Brooklyn. She’d blend right in on any number of streets.

She drops down to sit next to him. She’s the closest they’ve ever been to each other when he wasn’t actively trying to kill her. He flinches when she reaches out to cup his face between her hands. He doesn’t understand. They weren’t anything to each other. He knows that much. Her touch is a comfort but that might just be the touch starvation. Steve’s the only one that engages with him with any regularity and Steve still has hangups about personal space having not grown up with that body he inhabits now.

Natasha leans her forehead against his, her knees pulled up close against her so she can be close to him. She breathes in deep then slowly out. It’s a repetitive sequence he finds himself mirroring before too long. It stills the thoughts running in his head. It spits out the anger and despair warring within him. He loses track of time simply focused on the warmth of her hands and the constancy of her breathing.

“You’re going to be okay. You’re going to figure out who you are.”

Her words make him laugh bitterly. “How can you know that?”

“Remember, I was you once upon a time. Until Barton made a different choice.”

“But you’d been yourself up until that point.”

Bucky watches the wry quirk of her smile out of the corner of his eye.

“I’m not so certain of that. Most of my memories are fuzzy from that time. Indistinct and blurred. Hazy like dreams than truth and what I know happened are just as dreamlike as the rest. So who knows what’s the actual truth and what are the lies the Red Room decided they wanted me to believe?”

She pulls her head back from his and gently pushes his hair behind his ears. “Look at me, James.”

It’s the first time she’s called him that since her first visit to Wakanda and his reaction to it. This time he does what he’s told and meets her gaze. Her hands move to take his between hers and squeeze tight. If he was anyone else it might’ve hurt. She doesn’t let go. She searches his gaze to make sure she has his full attention.

“You know it’s okay to not want to be the person you used to be. You’re allowed.” Natasha pauses. “It’s because you aren’t that person. Not anymore and the sooner they and you begin to realize that then the better off everyone will be. It’s okay to hate that you can’t be. It’s also okay to hate them for wanting you to be. The suspicion, well, that never quite goes away. You just have to learn to ignore it and be yourself. The person you want to be.”

“And who do you want me to be?”

“Whoever you want to be. I don’t have a dog in this fight, Barnes. I’m just here to help and make sure you don’t go off the rails.”

Bucky snorts. The Black Widow can hold her own against him but she’s no enhanced super soldier. She’d slow him down for a few moments as they’ve already seen. She’d need more tricks to keep him from forcing his way out.

“Seems like a pretty tall order for a single person.”

She shrugs and doesn’t rise to the bait. She leans back, letting her hands slip from his, while her eyes flick over him. He wonders what he sees about him, what she notices that he wouldn’t have a clue about. He’s done his research on her, read her file, and dredged through his memories. He’s read all their files but her he _knows_. He knew her on that bridge when he had no memories of his own.

She’s not someone he slept with. He’d know that. At least he thinks he would. It’s not like they let him off the leash long enough for that anyway. He was too much of a mindless automaton. He reaches into his boot and pulls out one of the knives she gave him. He holds it on his open palm toward her. Her face doesn’t change. She merely raises an eyebrow.

“And?”

“What kind were your favorites?”

Her eyebrows go up in surprise and she picks up the knife, turning it in her hands.

“You favored the heftier ones, the ones with obvious intent. I preferred the ones with a little more flair to their design. A little more individuality.”

She drags a finger along the hilt, rubbing it along where the inscription would be. She knew from the beginning. He’s unsurprised.

“Were we together?”

“No, we were simply colleagues. They paired us together often to work missions. We had a rather high success rate.”

She says this with a bland even tone and that tells him more than any words could. 

“What happened to our handlers, our organization?”

Natasha gives him a vicious grin. He gives her the side eye.

“You had a rather long, busy career with SHIELD. How did you manage to do that on the side?”

“Some things are going to stay secret until you figure them out for yourself, Barnes.”

“No, don’t. Call me ‘James.’ Everyone else already calls me that.”

He shrugs a shoulder in response to her look. She knows a him that isn’t either the two people he’s let define himself for the past several months. It’s a man he may not wholly want to be but it won him her friendship despite everything else. That has to mean something. A woman like Natasha Romanoff doesn’t tie her loyalty to just anyone. Her loyalty to SHIELD had been based on two people: Nick Fury and Clint Barton. The world had already seen what she would do to fulfill a promise broken to either of them. He wanted to know the kind of man he could be that would let her continue to place her trust in him.

“Fine. But you’re the one in charge of explaining it to anyone that asks.”

“Small price to pay. Are you going to keep dropping hints about my past like some demented cat?”

She scowls at him. “Not if I keep finding you moping in a corner like some sad kicked puppy. That’s not you.”

“Yeah, you try being cooped up in a fancy prison for months on end and see where it leads you.”

She laughs. “You ready to go talk to Steve again? I think he’s been wearing a hole in the carpet in his room.”

Bucky rolls his eyes. “He worries too much. I can take care of myself. I took care of that little punk for most of his life and he better not forget it.”

She pushes to her feet and offers him a hand. He takes it and makes it to his feet with relatively little wobbling. The muscle fatigue’s going to get him hard tonight. He’ll be lucky to make it out of bed in the morning. Even his enhanced healing has its limits. He’s rolling his shoulders to work out the kinks from sitting hunched like he was when Natasha hands him the knife back.

He rubs his thumb along the faded inscription. “You’re telling me the truth about the past, right?”

Her green eyes are serious as she looks up at him. “I don’t lie to friends, Bar-James. The knives were a gift from a friend to another friend. Nothing more.”

He watches her walk away from him like the several other times she’s dropped in to visit and run into him specifically. He doesn’t know what makes him do it, but he calls out, “You staying?”

“Yeah, I’ll see you tomorrow, James. I think maybe it’s time we talked about a few things.”

She gives him a two fingered salute wave over her shoulder and the flash of memory slams through him.

“Hey! That was my move!”

She grins over her shoulder at him. “Wonder who I learned it from.”


End file.
